


i have a rendezvous with death

by leonidaslion



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Animal Transformation, Apocalypse, Bromance, Future Fic, Gen, POV Outsider, angel!dean, demon!Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-02
Updated: 2011-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-18 22:07:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Antichristmas gift for jukeboxhound.</p><p>Harvie doesn't know what to make of the man who saved her, or his great, yellow-eyed hound, but one thing's for sure: there are stranger things in this rider-ridden world than haunts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i have a rendezvous with death

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jukeboxhound](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jukeboxhound/gifts).



It’s funny, the things that go through a girl’s mind when she’s about to die.

In Harvie’s case, those things include, in no particular order: the too-brilliant quality of the sunlight; a wish that she’d had more for breakfast than a couple of late-season berries; a snatch of a lullaby her granma used to sing to her when they lived in a town instead of a roaming camp; the sparrow-terrified beat of the heart in her chest; her mama’s smile, and the feel of her long yellow hair caught in Harvie’s reaching fingers; the pressure of a nameless boy’s mouth against hers; the same boy’s face the next morning, his eyes open and his mouth torn away by some quiet, sneaking ghoul during the night; the beauty of the laelaps hound’s grey, stonelike coat; a favorite hair tie left forgotten at a campsite years back; the fear; the fear; the fear...

Another hound comes out of nowhere, knocking into the beast that’s sprinting toward Harvie where she lies on the ground. She’s too confused by the suddenness of it to understand that it isn’t another laelaps until seconds later, after she’s scrambled to her feet again. Then hope rushes in, painful, and knocks about in her head until adrenaline and the will to live push out all but the necessity of the present.

The trees in her immediate vicinity are too straight and thick for rapid climbing. The river—the same river that swept her away from the camp and into the wilds when she fell in two days ago—is too far to reach quickly enough for a plunge to carry her to safety, and anyway, as heavy as laelaps are, they can swim. She’s unarmed but for a knife at her boot; petty defense against a beast with a pelt of stone. If only she’d been carrying a gun when she went into the river, but guns are precious and she’s far too young to have earned the right to bear one, even if her granma was Joey, Ellen’s daughter.

Her only hope, really, is that the new hound wins the battle and is less fond of screaming meals than the laelaps.

Dropping into a defensive crouch, she draws her knife and watches the two hounds roll across the forest floor in a swirl of old leaves. The newcomer’s coat is shaggy and dark, well suited for the chill of autumn. The hound is just as large as the laelaps, and bulky where the laelaps seems deceptively lean. Its claws must be harder than they look, because it’s leaving deep gouges out of the laelaps’ hide—white scours where stone has been scraped away.

“Down!”

The man’s voice is completely unexpected, and Harvie twists in her crouch, bringing her knife up automatically before the sight of the man with the shotgun registers. She ducks lower a moment later, although it doesn’t seem to have been her that the man was calling to: a grating bark draws her eyes back toward the battling beasts, just in time to see the brown hound kick away from the laelaps and flop low against the leaves.

Snarling, the laelaps leaps for the other hound, only to be thrown sideways as a booming echo shakes the woods. There’s a hole out of its side now, and blood staining the leaf-strewn ground as well as its grey hide. It’s still struggling to rise, though, and Harvie is relieved when the man steps forward and sends another round through the laelaps’ skull.

Headless, the stone body collapses to the earth and seeps red into the dirt from its severed neck.

Looks like Harvie isn’t going to die today after all.

* * * * * *

The hound’s name is Sammy, Harvie learns when the man calls him, and he has yellow eyes.

The color makes Harvie shrink back at first, breathless with memories of other beasts she’s seen with such sickly, glowing gazes. She wonders if she’s fallen from the kettle into the flames—a laelaps isn’t the worst thing to be caught by, no, not at all, and not everything that plays at being human is honest. The man seems oblivious to her scrutiny as he crouches low and runs his hands over the hound’s body, though, checking for injuries and murmuring soft words in a language that she doesn’t comprehend.

Riders speak that way, sometimes. And riders would be exactly the type to own a beast like Sammy, with those horrible, stomach-turning eyes.

The man ( _is he, though? is he really?_ ) has a grin caught at the edge of his mouth when he looks up at Harvie, like he knows exactly what she’s thinking, and she juts her chin out and tightens her grip on her knife. If she’s bound for death, she’s meeting it on her own two feet.

“Christo,” she challenges.

The man looks her straight in the eyes, not the faintest flicker of a rider in his gaze, and then gives Sammy’s shaggy side a pat before standing.

“Got a camp back this way if you’re hungry,” he offers casually. “Your choice.”

Then he turns and walks away, his yellow-eyed hound keeping pace beside him.

Harvie waits all of a minute before she follows.

* * * * * *

Dinner is a thick, hearty stew—deer meat, carrots, potatoes. Harvie wolfs down two bowls and then, sheepishly, accepts a third. Her mama always said she ate like she’d been born a boy.

They eat in silence for the most part, which Harvie is thankful for, because she doesn’t know what to say. Now that she’s slowly becoming sure that she hasn’t fallen in with riders, she’s acutely aware of how good-looking the man is: back at camp, he sure wouldn’t lack for willing bed partners, with his green eyes and generous mouth. And he’s rich, too—shotgun, three pistols that Harvie can see, a pouch of salt, his own horse. Handsome, rich and dangerous. He must be dangerous, to be confident enough to travel on his own.

The crackling of the fire is soothing, and Harvie finds her eyes drooping as she finishes her final bowl. The rumble of the man’s voice as he speaks to the hound with words Harvie doesn’t understand is a lullaby of its own force. She’s been wakeful since she went into the river over two days past—had to be; go to sleep alone and unguarded in the wild and she wouldn’t ever have woken up.

Despite the sun’s rays and the awareness that she’s among strange company ( _not haunts, but strange all the same_ ), Harvie doesn’t protest as the man gently takes the bowl and spoon from her. Nor does she startle when she finds herself lifted and carried a short distance to be set down on a pile of blankets.

“Keep her warm, would you, Sammy?” the man says as a hand smoothes down her hair—reminds her of her mama, who must be near to frantic by now. She might be stitching up a pyre baby, cloth stuffed full of straw and twigs, to burn in Harvie’s place. So often, Harvie has seen the little dolls crafted. So often, she has seen collections of them burnt while loved ones’ eyes sting and water from the smoke.

So often, the dead leave no traces behind for the living to mourn.

 _I’m here, mama,_ she thinks dreamily.

A soft, tickling warmth nudges at her front. A cold nose pokes her cheek.

Harvie’s arm seems to weigh as much as ten laelaps, but she lifts it up anyway, and feels the warmth drop heavily down against her front. When she lowers her hand again, she touches thick pelt, curls her fingers into the fur. Air whuffs against her face, and her last thought before the tides of sleep carry her away is that Sammy’s eyes aren’t yellow at all.

They’re gold.

* * * * * *

She wakes in the morning to find herself alone. The man’s things are still there, however, and his horse, so Harvie assumes he plans on coming back. She shifts around the camp, making herself useful by bundling up the blankets she spent the night on and building up the banked fire once more.

The pistols are a temptation. With one of those, she could likely make her way northward again, find the traces of her camp. They won’t be there any longer, shift site every couple of days to avoid drawing in haunts or beasts or riders, but she’s trail canny enough to follow to their present location.

But Harvie is reluctant to set out on her own again. The forest was an empty, terrifying place those two days before the laelaps found her. Death lurked behind every tree, and the sunlight was as much revealing enemy as friend. It’s nice to feel safe enough to smile at the sky again.

Anyway, the man seems keen enough to track her down before she’d gone more than a mile. He might be generous with a harmless rescued girl, but she doubts his kindness would extend to thieves.

The man’s return is heralded by crashing brush, which makes Harvie wrinkle her nose in scorn—the littlest child of her camp knows better than to make such a ruckus—until she sees that the noise isn’t coming from the man at all. It’s the hound Sammy bounding carelessly through the underbrush and leaves into camp. There are twigs and burrs stuck in the hound’s thick pelt. His tongue lolls sideways from his mouth in an easy-going grin.

Despite his unsettling eyes, Harvie can’t help but laugh.

The man appears in the hound’s wake, moving much more silently and bearing a trio of fat rabbits. He holds them up when he catches Harvie’s gaze.

“Breakfast.”

“I could clean them for you,” Harvie offers, obedient to her mama’s whispered reminder of manners at the back of her thoughts.

“You sure you’re old enough to know how?” the man returns, tilting his head to level a measuring look at her.

Harvie feels her cheeks heat with a blush underneath his scrutiny and hates her own silliness. It isn’t as though he’s looking at her like she’s a prospective bedmate—more like she isn’t old enough to be off the apron string. Which is fair insulting, now she thinks of it.

Lifting her chin, she informs him, “I’m fifteen summers already.”

“Don’t look more than ten,” the man says, although she notes that he does drop the rabbits down in front of her without another word of argument. He doesn’t offer her a knife, either, which must mean he noticed and approved of her blade when they met earlier.

“My mama always says don’t judge a person by their skin,” Harvie tells him, only slightly mollified by the show of respect.

“It’s what’s behind the eyes that matters,” the man finishes. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.”

The truth of the full saying sits heavily within Harvie’s chest, and she curls her hand around her knife handle as she says, “I checked yours. How come you never checked mine?”

The man shrugs. “Didn’t think a demon—a rider—would be dumb enough to get cornered by a laelaps.”

 _Liar,_ Harvie thinks but doesn’t say. It isn’t polite, first off, and she doesn’t know what makes her so sure he’s skirting truths on her. Maybe it’s the word he used—demon. She hasn’t heard anyone call a rider by that name since her granma passed.

The man seems oblivious to her mistrustful stare as he sits down on a convenient log and whistles for the hound. Sammy hurries over instantly, tail wagging, and then stands still and obedient while the man’s clever hands pluck all of the twigs and burrs from his coat.

As the moment pulls long through the small camp, Harvie can feel the man’s awareness of her growing like a solid, uncomfortable weight in the air. He must know she’s watching and not gutting the rabbits like she said she would. He must know that she’s waiting to see if he’ll change form on her, or give his true self away somehow.

A haunt, just another haunt toying with a poor, stupid girl until it gets tired of the game.

But it’s the hound that turns his head finally, fixing Harvie with a golden, steady gaze across the fire.

Staring at her like he’s looking right into her soul.

With an involuntary shudder, Harvie cuts her eyes away from the pair that has no business existing or coming into her life, and busies herself instead with the rabbits.

* * * * * *

The way that the man shares out two of the rabbits with Sammy eases the worst of Harvie’s leaden suspicions. The hound seems too gentle as he sits there, accepting the offered bites of roasted, steaming meat from the man’s fingers with almost fussy care. The man is too still and uncaring of Harvie in her own place—surely if they were haunts looking for sport, they’d be trying to lure her into lowering her guard.

Instead, they don’t seem to care that she’s there at all. It’s vexing, but doesn’t strike her as particularly dangerous.

After breakfast, the man washes their plates in the river and then begins to pack up camp. Harvie makes herself small and stays out of his way, her stomach twisting around the heavy weight of having been recently well fed. The man hasn’t mentioned letting her come with him yet, hasn’t given any sign as to which way he’s traveling.

Heck, he hasn’t even told Harvie his name. Not that she’s offered hers either, but... He’s full-grown and armed; she’s got nothing but her wits and a tiny knife for defense. He already has enough of an advantage over her without her giving him that sort of hold on her too.

It isn’t until the man has finished tying everything into place in his saddlebags ( _how he fits everything is a miracle_ ) that he finally turns back to Harvie.

“So,” he says, one hand resting easily on the saddle. “Where are we dropping you?”

It isn’t what Harvie was expecting from him, and she hears herself dumbly repeating, “Dropping me?”

Reaching down to give Sammy a scratch behind the ears, the man says, “What did you think, that I was going to save your life and then throw you back out there on your own?”

That’s almost exactly what Harvie was dreading for the past few minutes, and she bites down on her lower lip as she grapples with the surge of hope within her chest.

“So where’s it going to be?” the man asks, still not looking all that concerned with her response. “There’s a town a few days west.”

“No,” Harvie answers just as soon as she can make her locked-up throat work. “Towns aren’t safe. We—we move.”

“You’re with a camp, then,” the man says. It isn’t a question, but he tilts his head and waits for her to respond.

“Northward,” she tells him with a nod. “I fell in the river and it swept me downstream before anyone knew what was happening. It took me a while to find somewhere I could climb out. I’ve been making my way back, but it’s slow going on my own.”

The man’s eyes go distant and pale for a moment, and then his mouth purses in a funny way. She thinks he might refuse to take her home, but he just asks, “How long ago was that?”

“Three days now.”

“You have any reason to think they’re still there hoping you’ll turn up?”

Harvie shakes her head. It’s the first rule of the camp that she learned: out of sight, out of protection. The lost and the separated are welcomed back if they can make their way, but there’s no risking the safety of the whole for the sake of the one. Most loners usually die within an hour, anyway. Harvie has been luckier than she deserves.

The man turns his head, looking northward as though he can see through the miles to her mama and the rest. “Camps move pretty fast,” he notes, hand stroking absently over the leather saddle. “Can you ride?”

Harvie’s back stiffens instinctively at the insinuation that her camp might be one of those squalid, desperate places where people go to die. No provisions, no defenses, no way to outpace the haunts.

“We have horses,” she says, letting her chilly pride show through in her voice.

There’s a faint smile on the man’s lips when he looks back at her, and a wry expression on his face that makes her think the slight was unintentional or imagined. She flushes with embarrassment, but doesn’t look away.

“We’ll take Impala, then,” the man says, and then turns his back to her and gives his horse’s sable neck a pat. “Cover more ground.”

He swings in an easy, practiced motion, settling himself before urging the horse over to Harvie and offering her a hand. She hesitates before closing her fingers around his, then resists his tug upward so that she can continue looking him in the eyes.

“I’m Harvie,” she announces. Her heart pounds deafeningly at her daring, and she half expects the man’s face to change now, his eyes to melt black or yellow or red or, God help her, white.

But his eyes continue green as a corner of his mouth quirks up.

“I’m Dean,” he answers—name for a name—and then nods toward the hound waiting patiently by the cold remains of their fire. “Sammy you’ve met.”

Harvie should just accept that she’s been reeled in to safety now. She should be assured that things are as they ought to be. But something about the man and his hound makes her hold back still, leg muscles poised to send her into a sprint that can’t help to save her from a horse’s speed—or from the hound’s, for that matter.

“Are you haunts?” she whispers.

A person can ask, she’s been told. And if they ask straight out, under the weird of exchanged names, they have to be answered true.

But Dean laughs—a hearty, amused sound—and when he pulls this time, Harvie allows herself be swung up behind him. Her arms go around his waist—a solid, muscular feel to him that makes her heart beat faster and runs a warmth through her body—and she hides her face against his back to keep Sammy’s too intelligent eyes from picking her blush out.

As they ride out from their old camp through the morning sunshine, Harvie can’t help thinking that he never really answered her question.

* * * * * *

They stop that evening in the shade of an old tree twisted into shapes that Harvie is certain will give her nightmares. But the river is nearby, and they’re atop a crest in the rolling landscape, so she can’t fault the choice. And the tree’s hardly visible at all once darkness drapes itself over the land and shadows creep in. The fire at the camp’s center is warm and familiar, its flickering light making Dean seem even more beautiful than before—something Harvie can’t quite credit.

Their dinner is another stew, this one mainly vegetables and some small traces of leftover meat. Sammy whines and turns his nose up at his share, to which Dean mutters, “Dude, what do you want me to do here? That’s what I’ve got.”

With a put-upon sigh, the hound lowers his head and eats.

Later, when the dishes have been washed in the river and they’re all settled back around the fire, Dean pulls over a bag he removed from Impala’s back and unfastens the ties. The metal bits he brings out are shiny and well cared for: brass gears and steel screws that he must have scavenged from one of the great boneyards. Those are places that Harvie was raised to avoid, places where untold multiples of men used to dwell in close company.

They were the first places to be overwhelmed and soaked red when the riders swarmed up out of Hell and became a plague upon the earth.

 _Seetis,_ Harvie’s granma used to call them. She was one of the few Harive has met who were old enough to recall the world before the Harrowing, and she spoke of spurs of metal and stone rising up from the earth to poke holes in the sky, and vehicles that sped along faster than the fastest horses—some up in the air, where everyone knows man can’t go. The seetis used to be wonderful places, before the riders came and turned them to ruined twists of metal and crumbled stone, but no one goes there now. Not when folks died in such numbers during the Harrowing, their bodies lying where they fell to rot, with no decent, clean burning offered.

But she somehow doesn’t doubt that her companions might dare to journey there.

“What are those?” Harvie asks as Dean unrolls a hide and selects a red-handled instrument from the line of tools.

“Odds and ends,” Dean answers absently, using the tool to bind some of the shining bits of metal together. Then, before Harvie can ask a follow-up, he adds, “It’s boring out here with no TV. So I have to make my own fun.”

“What’s TV?”

Dean makes a humorless snort and shakes his head. “What’s TV,” he echoes. “You hear that one, Sammy? Christ.”

Harvie, embarrassed by her own ignorance, doesn’t ask again.

* * * * * *

They ride into Harvie’s camp early the next afternoon. Harvie knows because of the half-burnt wagons with her granma’s sign painted in blue, and the mottled blue and white pot that Ray and Em, who slept one fire over, used to cook their meals in. There’s a head up in the skeletal branches of a tree, long yellow hair caught on the rough bark holding up the lazily swinging, fleshy skull.

Harvie slides down from Impala and staggers forward, feet kicking through ash and burnt bits of bone. There’s a dried flap of skin being blown across the ground like a leaf, and inside Harvie’s chest the world is quiet and small. Everything is at once over-bright and dark. Her skin feels flushed.

She walks toward the yellow hair, catching brief glimpses of a familiar face as it half-turns back toward her before swaying the other way again. She stops near a savaged ribcage, face tilted up and watching as the head turns in the wind.

 _In the treetop,_ she hears her mama’s distant voice sing in her head, _when the wind blows._

Leather creaks as Dean dismounts behind her. The crunch of his boots through the carpet of leaves and other debris is at once deafeningly loud and hushed. He steps up behind her, standing close enough to touch, and then stops.

She waits for him to put an arm around her shoulder or tell her to turn away, not to look. He does neither. He just stands there silently while the head swings and the smell of death sinks into Harvie’s skin.

A pitiful whine signals Sammy’s arrival at Harvie’s side. A cold, moist nose bumps her limp, numb fingers.

Finally, Dean says, “Your mother?”

Harvie watches as the face swings away, hiding the gouges and ruined features. Hiding the bloody holes that should have held blue, kind eyes.

The crows have been at their work here.

“No,” she answers in a voice that’s unexpectedly steady.

When the wind turns the head around and she gets a look at the face again, she can’t tell whether she’s relieved or not that it isn’t a lie.

* * * * * *

It’s impractical to collect all the bits and pieces for burning, and dangerous to light a larger fire—the flames could spin round and catch them up in the blaze as well—so they have to settle for half-measures. Dean gathers wood for the burn while Harvie tends to her own, climbing up to cut down the head. It’s surreal to think that the ruined lump in her hands used to belong to Sally, daughter of Heather, mother of Cal.

Harvie waved a morning greeting to Sally just four days past. Sally smiled at her, and then turned back to tell Cal to go wash up before breakfast.

She spends almost an hour wandering through the carnage before she admits that she could look for weeks without finding a recognizable scrap. Tears threaten then, but she holds them down as she scavenges some clean cloth and a needle and thread and sits down on a rock at the edge of camp. She stitches up the pyre baby, filling it with clean-smelling pine needles and then sits staring out at nothing in particular while holding the doll in her hand and remembering her mother’s voice, and the sagey, earthen scent of her, and the taste of her coal-baked breads.

Then she sets the pyre baby aside and makes a second and a third while Dean walks the perimeter of the camp and Sammy lies with his head in her lap, golden eyes moist and sorrowful whenever she accidentally catches his gaze. A crow flaps down into the center of the camp with a caw, head darting in for some tasty delicacy. Another answers its call from further out in the woods—diner time, I’m coming, brother.

She could be here for days, she realizes with a dull, throbbing ache. She could sit and stitch for days and not come close to honoring the dead.

Tentatively, Sammy shifts his head and licks her knuckles with a whine.

She pushes his head away, gathering the pyre babies up and bringing them over to the wooden frame she built from broken pieces of the wagons. The last two dolls are placed carefully, the first receives a quick kiss before joining them. Sally’s head, wrapped up in a spare towel that Harvie found fluttering on a bush, goes into the center.

She’s just kneeling to light the fire when Dean walks up beside her. “How many?” he asks.

It’s the first thing he’s said in hours, and Harvie feels an irrational pulse of anger.

“You already know,” she answers. She’s too frayed to bandy with him, and she might be distracted at present, but he wasn’t exactly subtle in his surveying of the wreckage.

“Yeah,” Dean admits after a pause.

“You knew they were dead when you saved me.” She’s remembering his face when she mentioned her camp. The faraway look in his eyes. The strange pull of his mouth.

This time, Dean lets his silence speak for him.

The question that Harvie should be asking now is whether he had anything to do with it—him and his rider-eyed dog. But somehow, she already knows that they didn’t. This—the slaughter here—it’s a separate tragedy. Not a tragedy even, but a fact of life.

Camps go missing every year. It’s a mercy she was able to find hers before the world swallowed it up and they went unmourned.

Dean knew, somehow, same as he knew she wasn’t a rider without checking, but he isn’t to blame.

“What are you, Dean?” It isn’t the question she asked before she let him pull her up on his horse, although she should have. She should have asked and refused to budge until he told her true.

In the crackling of flame and wood, Dean doesn’t answer her, but Harvie isn’t surprised.

* * * * * *

They camp that night to the east of the massacre site, in a hollow with their fire banked low. For the first time, Harvie sees Dean walk the perimeter of the camp in a circle while whispering words that tug at her insides. His fingers draw lines of blue fire through the air, and Sammy whimpers where he’s lying by the fire. His golden eyes are pained when Harvie looks at him. His paws dig in the earth.

Dean finishes his walk and comes back to the fire, sitting down beside the hound and pulling his head into his lap.

“Sorry, Sammy,” he says, stroking the hound’s heaving flank.

Harvie rolls onto her side, lying with her back to her companions, and watches Impala’s uneasy shifting by the edges of their camp. The horse is just nervous, though. Big and black and natural in a way that the two behind Harvie can’t ever hope to be.

Harvie thinks that sleep will be a long time coming, that it will be preceded by tears and fearful thoughts of locking the darkness inside that blue ring with them, but she’s asleep in moments. Still, and soft, and calm.

She dreams of her mama’s smile.

* * * * * *

Sometime in the dark, her dreams shallow and shift. She thinks she can hear voices, somewhere close, talking in hushed tones.

“...sure she’s Ellen’s line?” the first, familiar voice asks.

“Suspected it for a while,” a second, hoarse and almost pained voice answers. “I’m sure now, though. Jo’s scent was all over those wagons.”

“Damn it. I knew I should have made her take some tags the last time we—”

“You can’t save everyone, Dean.”

“Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.”

“You and your goddamned crusade! Did you ever stop and think how I feel—”

“Maybe I would if you’d tell me more often. Why the fuck did you even bother popping out tonight, huh? Gone four years without hearing you nag me; another four’d suit me fine.”

There’s a long moment of silence where Harvie sinks lower, and then the hoarse voice, hesitant and apologetic, asks, “What are we do with her?”

“Well, we’re not keeping her, that’s for sure—I mean it, dude, don’t even bother giving me that look. Christ, that’s all we need: another Harvelle chasing after us.”

“You begged Cas to bring Jo and Ellen back, Dean. You can’t just—”

“I know!” the familiar voice snaps. “I fucking know, okay? Couple of tags would’ve solved everything, but of course the great Harvelles are too proud for a ‘handout’. What a goddamned mess.”

If the hoarse, low voice makes a reply, then Harvie has sunk too deep into the dark to hear it.

* * * * * *

In the morning, Dean shakes Harvie awake with a brusque hand on her shoulder.

“We have to move,” is all he says, but Harvie hears them almost instantly—distant, many-voiced calls, something between a loon and a bullfrog. They come from different parts of the woods, in a wide arc around them, and the golden rays of the morning sun offer no comfort.

Too many haunts don’t care about the warmth of the light. It doesn’t stop them; it doesn’t even slow them.

The unburied, snapped bones and bloodied ground they left behind them yesterday is proof of that.

Most of their small camp is already packed, and while Harvie stands shivering in the early morning light, Dean quickly rolls up her bedding and ties it in place on a waiting Impala. It doesn’t take him more than a few moments, but the calls are noticeably closer already by the time he finishes, and he doesn’t waste a moment before swinging up into the saddle. Harvie isn’t even given a chance to digest the large, black horse pounding toward her before Dean’s arm is around her chest and she’s being hauled up into his lap.

She’s too frightened to protest, and does her best to adjust to the uncomfortable position, leaning forward to wrap her arms around Impala’s neck.

“Hang on,” Dean tells her, and then says something in a sharper, clipped tone—to Sammy, Harvie supposes, since she’s only ever heard him use that language with the hound.

Sammy gives a single bark and bounds off—in the opposite direction as Dean wheels Impala. Harvie’s instinctual urge to yell a protest wars with the memory of last night: Dean walking the boundaries and laying down clean, blue lines while the hound writhed in pain. Those golden, unnatural eyes. A rider’s eyes.

By the time she remembers Sammy also pressing close to her side with the scent of death and ash all around, offering what limited comfort he could, they’re already speeding through the woods at a breakneck pace.

“We can’t leave him!” she protests belatedly, craning her neck around to shout back at Dean.

“Sammy can take care of himself,” Dean grunts and jerks Impala’s head to one side to avoid a steep gully. “Can you shoot straight?”

“My mama taught me,” Harvie answers, which must be answer enough for Dean because she finds a pistol pressed into her hand.

“Just the ones ahead of us,” Dean says, maintaining his grip on the reins with one hand. “We need a hole in the net.”

Next to her ear, another pistol cocks.

They plunge down a short hill, then up the other side and through a stream. That horrible noise is all around them now, insane calls edged with triumph, and Harvie gets her first glimpse of the haunts as Dean swerves Impala into what must be a deer track. The haunts are nothing Harvie has seen before: elongated and black, with skin stretched over bones that protrude and bulge in the painful-looking places. Their heads are mostly mouth; their mouths mostly teeth. Spindly arms end in four double-jointed fingers tipped with curving claws.

There’s a sea of them, coating the forest around them like leaves, and Dean yells a war cry in Harvie’s ear that she echoes with her own scream. The barrel of the gun in her hand shines like fire in the dappling sunlight. The muzzle flashes and roars.

If Harvie’s eyes water as she fires and fires and fires until she’s sure the gun in her hand should need reloading, then it isn’t because she’s thinking that this must have been the end her mama saw.

It’s the speed of their passage blurring her vision. It’s adrenaline.

Around them, the haunts in the forest scream.

* * * * * *

There’s no clear moment in Harvie’s head when they break free.

She’s cognizant, finally, only of Dean’s soothing, rumbling voice in her ear, and Dean’s hands prying her fingers open from around the trigger of the pistol.

“Easy,” he murmurs. “Easy, there.”

Impala walks slowly, her gait even, and there’s a strong, cold wind whipping up Harvie’s hair that tells her they’re no longer in the woods.

“It’s okay,” Dean says as he finally manages to pull the pistol free. “You’re safe.”

Harvie’s chest twists and she throws herself forward, her arms around Impala’s neck and her face pressed against the horse’s coarse mane.

“She’s gone,” she gasps. “They’re all gone.”

A hand touches the back of her head, light and awkward.

Harvie remembers Sally’s head, hair tangled in bare branches as it swung with the breeze, and shuts her eyes more tightly against the overwhelming light of the sun.

* * * * * *

“Some might argue they’re better off,” Dean offers later, as the sun paints the horizon and the rolling, grass-covered hills red. There’s still no sign of Sammy, but he doesn’t seem worried.

“I wish you’d left me there,” Harvie answers, forcing the word through a throat rubbed raw. “I wish you let them take me.”

“No, you don’t.”

The real, shameful horror is that he’s right.

* * * * * *

The owl flaps in just after dark, when they’ve finally stopped to make hasty camp. Harvie is stirring some beans in the cast iron pot when it flutters past her face, making her cry out and fall backwards off the pack she was using as a seat.

Dean doesn’t startle. He just turns and holds out an arm, offering it as a perch. The owl comes around, soaring in his direction, then banks and comes to a fluttering, graceful halt. Its powerful claws wrap around Dean’s forearm, sharp enough to slice through hide and man both, but Dean’s grimace holds more annoyance than pain.

The owl flaps its wings once, catching its balance, and then swivels its head around to peer at Harvie with wide, golden eyes.

Harvie stares back as the bottom falls out of the world.

“You couldn’t have just stayed a damned dog,” Dean mutters in the owl’s direction, sounding disgusted.

Stomach tight, Harvie tears her eyes away and looks back down at the beans, listening to the crickets out in the dark.

After several moments of silence, Dean strides over to the fire and crouches down across from her, the arm with the owl perched on it held out stiffly for balance.

“Harvie,” he starts heavily.

“Dinner’s ready,” Harvie blurts before he can say whatever he means to. “I’ll get the bowls.”

Her back crawls the whole time it’s turned to them.

* * * * * *

Sammy is back the next morning, lying on his stomach and watching her. When he sees that she’s awake and looking at him, he wags his tail slowly from side to side. If Harvie had to give a name to the expression on his face is, she’d call it apologetic.

She gets up and moves away to make water without acknowledging him.

* * * * * *

It’s just after noon when they come across the camp.

Dean sees it first, coming to attention in the saddle, and Harvie reads the sighting in the stiffening of the body in front of her. She peers around his side, squinting, and can just make out the lumpy shapes of wagons in the distance. Her stomach and chest move uncertainly as she realizes what it must be. She glances down at Sammy, who has spent the day frolicking and doing his best to look as harmless as possible, and then away again before the hound can detect her attention and look back.

She thinks they might turn eastward, avoid the camp, but instead Dean angles Impala toward the wagons and picks up some speed.

“If you want to stay with them,” he says as they ride close enough to draw the attention of sentries, “We’ll understand.”

Harvie bites the inside of her cheek and doesn’t respond.

* * * * * *

The camp is led by a man named David. His wife, Jesse, is a horse-faced woman with a kind smile who takes Harvie under her wing without being asked. Harvie is taken down to the stream the camp has halted beside, and given soap and a cloth, and for the first time in a week allowed a moment to bathe. She’s offered new clothing, and food, and clucked over as her hair is brushed and arranged.

“You’re a pretty ‘un beneath all that wildness,” Jesse tells her as she ties Harvie’s hair back. “Don’t hide that face.”

The boys of the camp look Harvie’s way with new interest when she reappears, but Harvie’s skin itches underneath their eyes. They seem so silly suddenly; they seem fools. Harvie doubts that they’ve ever seen more than a couple of black-eyed riders in their travels. One or two fresh kills.

She avoids their greetings and finds her way over to one of the smaller fires, where Dean is sitting with his bag of metal gears open and his tool-kit spread out to his left and Sammy’s head in his lap. The two of them, man and hound both, go still and cautious when Harvie drops down across from them. She digs the heel of her new, gifted shoes into the dirt and stares into the fire, hoping that it hides the awkward blush creeping across her skin.

“I like the hair,” Dean says finally. “Easier to shoot when you can see what you’re aiming at.”

Harvie’s chest expands with mingled relief and frustration—to be noticed, by this man, the way those boys noticed her... But no. This is better. This makes her feel more like the Harvie who stood in a clearing and tossed knives at a bole in a chunk of wood underneath her granma’s stern eye.

Emboldened by Dean’s willful avoidance of the strain between them, Harvie lifts her gaze again and asks, “What are you making?”

When she asked him before in the woods, Dean shrugged the question off. Now, though, he gestures her closer with the tool in his hand and, when she comes to sit beside Sammy—giving the hound’s coat a tentative pat—he shows her the device in his hands. It’s a small thing, delicately built, and Harvie’s eyes widen in surprise as she stares at it.

“It’s a butterfly,” she says.

Dean doesn’t look embarrassed at all by his work. He just nods and adjusts the fastenings on one of the wings.

“Check this out,” he says then and, after glancing around to make sure no one else is watching, offers the metal butterfly to Sammy. Sammy’s gold eyes fix on the figure, he heaves out a moist breath over it, and Harvie gives a surprised cry when the wings shiver. An instant later, the butterfly is hovering in the air over Dean’s palm, mechanical wings whirring with a beautiful, delicate sound like music.

“Witchery,” a disapproving voice proclaims to Harvie’s left.

She looks up to find David himself there—summoned, perhaps, by her involuntary outcry. She hates the man a little for the way his presence dims Dean’s smile.

“Not witch-work,” Dean corrects, catching the butterfly again. “Engineering.” He stands, dislodging Sammy’s head, and moves over to offer the butterfly for inspection. “I’m an artificer. I make things.”

“Guns?” David asks as he turns the butterfly over, inspecting it. He’s too absorbed with the device to catch the slight tightening of Dean’s jaw.

“Toys.”

“Ah,” David says, with a disappointed turn to his mouth. “And far too expensive for our purse. It is interesting to see, anyway.”

He passes the butterfly back to Dean and then, after a brief, wary glance in Sammy’s direction, turns and moves away.

“You could, though,” Harvie says after Dean has sat down again and is in the process of piecing a second figurine together—a tiny bear, Harvie thinks. “You could make them guns.”

“Any asshole can make a gun,” Dean mutters without looking up from his work.

They can’t, though. Harvie recalls meeting a gunsmith once with her camp. She recalls how much they had to pay for a single pistol and a month’s worth of shot.

Dean seems to sense her skepticism, because after a few moments, he frowns and says, “Some people, you give them a gun and they’ll use it on demons. Others, they’ll use it on things they want to call demons. You understand?”

Harvie thinks she does. She’s seen bandits, after all: outlaws who prey on all passing by under pretext of obeying some holy mission. She’s seen a man shoot another in the back because of a disagreement about a woman.

“How can you tell?” she asks.

Dean lifts one shoulder in a shrug. “Some people just have asshole written all over them,” he says.

At his feet, Sammy whuffs in agreement.

* * * * * *

The first boy shows up not long after that, standing at the edge of the fire watching Dean work with barely concealed longing. Dean tinkers as though unaware of his observer, although Harvie knows him well enough by now to understand that there are layers of deception and artifice to him. The boy, less wise, scuffs his feet in the dirt and bites his lower lip as Dean turns the bear over and over in his hands, as though studying it.

“Damn,” Dean mutters finally. “Made the tail a little short. What do you think, Sammy? Should I junk it?”

Harvie’s pretty sure the boy’s eyes couldn’t get any bigger.

She has to lift a hand to hide her smile as Dean shows the bear to Sammy. The way that the metal figure twitches to life as Sammy’s breath passes over it isn’t any less amazing the second time around, and when he sees the brass and steel bear wandering around Dean’s palm, the boy can’t contain himself any longer and shuffles forward.

Dean lifts his head, as though catching sight of him for the first time, and beckons the boy closer with his empty hand.

“Hey, kid,” he says. “You want to do me a favor?”

The boy nods wildly.

“I made this a little wrong—tail’s off. Can’t sell it for a can of beans. But I sure hate to just throw out something like this. You think you could find it a home?”

Mutely, the boy nods again and holds out his hand. He stares in disbelief for a moment when Dean transfers possession of the tiny bear, then scampers off in a cloud of dirt, as though afraid that Dean will change his mind if he lingers.

“They aren’t going to leave you alone now,” Harvie says. “All the children are going to want one.”

Dean doesn’t say anything, but the corner of his mouth twitches up into a smile.

* * * * * *

By the time they turn in that night, Dean has handed out twenty two of the tiny creatures. Harvie can’t believe how quickly he works, or how his small bag of materials somehow seems to hold everything he needs. He’s humming to himself as he lies down, despite the dark looks David and some of the other adults are giving him.

Sammy doesn’t seem pleased with him either, scorning Dean’s side to lie close by to Harvie instead.

“Dean,” Harvie says from her own blankets, one outstretched hand idly scratching at Sammy’s ears.

“Hmm?”

“Are you ever going to tell me what you are?”

There’s a long moment of silence, and then Dean says, “I like sleeping outside. It reminds me of when my brother and I used to sneak out of the house when we were kids. We lived in some real shitty apartments, and sometimes the mattresses sort of reeked, so Sammy and I would sneak out and sleep on the hood of the car. Watched a meteor shower that way once.”

The hound exhales, a long, wistful sound that chills Harvie’s chest more than the unfamiliar words Dean is using.

“Dean,” she says after a moment, “How old are you?”

“Old enough to know better than to stay all night talking,” he answers. His voice isn’t mean, but... well, it’s firm enough for Harvie to understand he’s done talking about that sort of thing.

So instead of pressing, Harvie offers, “My granma and I sat up one night watching the stars. She said they’re brighter now than they were when she was a girl.”

“They are.”

Something about the knowledgeable way he speaks catches her attention, and she thinks about the odd dream she had the night before their terrible flight from the woods. Thinking back to that terrible afternoon among the carnage of her camp is more difficult, but she has a vague memory of him standing by one of the half-burnt wagons with his head bowed and his hand pressed to the blue sigil on the wood.

“Did you know my granma?” she asks.

“Jesus Christ,” Dean mutters, shifting in his blankets. “If I say yes, will you let me go to sleep?”

“Yes. So did you?”

Dean sighs. “Go to sleep, Harvie.”

She hesitates—he seems to mean it—but in the end, she has to call, “Dean?”

“Shoot me. Shoot me right now and put me out of my misery.”

She doesn’t think he’s angry with her, though, as grumpy as he sounds, so Harvie risks his mood to say, “I’m coming with you tomorrow. If that’s... if it’s okay.”

There’s a beat of silence. Harvie listens to her own heartbeat and wonders what she’ll do if he says no.

“Depends on whether you’re going to shut up anytime this century,” Dean mumbles finally. His voice is warm, though: pleased and flattered.

Harvie grins herself all the way to sleep.

* * * * * *

Harvie is just bidding goodbye to kind-hearted Jesse the next morning when she hears the ruckus from the head of the forming wagon train. She sprints forward along with everyone else, Jesse at her heels, to find Dean squared off against David. Dean’s expression sucks the air from Harvie’s lungs like a kick to the gut. So much fury there. So much desperation.

He doesn’t seem to notice the guns out and aimed his way.

“You motherfucking asshole!” he shouts as Harvie pushes through the crowd toward him. “It’s a deathtrap! You go in there and you’ll kill everyone here.”

“We don’t listen to unholy haunts,” David answers, his teeth bared in something that’s more of a snarl than a smile. “Now, take your familiar and go before we settle you in the ground once and for all.”

Dean’s jaw works and he casts his eyes out over the crowd. Harvie feels his gaze pass over her like a brushfire.

“Anyone who steps foot in that forest is walking to their death,” he calls out.

Harvie understands in a rush what the argument is about and, on a fresh surge of adrenaline, pushes forward to Dean’s side. Sammy, lips drawn back from his teeth in a snarl shifts slightly to make room for her.

“He’s telling the truth!” she shouts, looking around the crowd for a sympathetic face. “My camp was killed not four days ago.”

“Then how comes it you still live?” David demands. “A girl, a lone toymaker, and a mutt. No, I think there is more at play here.” Raising his eyes, he looks about at his camp. “See the beast’s eyes! Unholy.”

Shouts rise from the crowd then, in support of their leader, and Harvie’s vision blurs as she shouts, “But it’s true!”

Pain explodes over the side of her face. She staggers sideways, is caught by Dean and held upright as white heat licks through her skull and her mouth zings with copper. When she lifts a shaking hand to her temple, her fingertips come away red.

A rock. Someone actually threw a rock at her.

“Sammy!” Dean barks. “No.”

She hears the growling then, and the roar of the crowd. The world tips on its side as she is lifted and carried away from the sound, the low rumbling of Sammy’s growl trailing behind and the jingle of a horse harness at her side.

The blue sky is a mass of confusion, and regret, and pain.

* * * * * *

Harvie is well enough to watch the last of the wagons disappear over the rise of a hill an hour later. Her head feels swollen and hot, and aches fiercely, but Dean has assured her that she’ll bear no scar. Not that she cares right now.

“How can they?” she whispers. “All those people.”

She remembers the black, spindly demons. The sheer masses of them, like an infestation of maggots in the forest’s dead carcass.

Dean is silent behind her, and she whirls on him, suddenly furious. She beats her fists against his chest and he stands there and lets her, his expression blank.

“You could have given them guns!” she yells. “You could have given them a chance! Help them! Go after them and help them!”

“They don’t want my help,” he says when she’s finished shouting. And then, in a strange, quiet voice, “I can’t save everyone.”

“Toys,” she spits, spinning away from him again. Her head pounds, but she refuses to let it show. She refuses to give in to the surge of nausea and throw up. “You could have given them guns,” she repeats.

“Do you really think that would have helped?”

Harvie remembers the swarms of demons again. In the trees, in the brush. Claws and gaping teeth. She remembers the carnage of her camp. A lone head swinging in the wind.

She leans over, one hand pressed to her own head, and is noisily sick.

* * * * * *

“I’m sorry,” she says later.

Dean is silent for a moment, staring off at the horizon while Sammy leans against his leg. When he turns to look at her, his eyes are red and wet.

“Me too.”

* * * * * *

Two days later, while they’re still making their slow way through the grassland, Harvie wakes up to find Sammy missing. Instead, Dean is walking around the camp with a ferret perched on his shoulder. The ferret is standing on its hind legs with its front paws on the top of Dean’s head, and the sight is so unexpected that Harvie lets out a laugh.

Dean turns, clearly startled by the noise, and the ferret blinks at Harvie with gold eyes, nose and tail twitching. This time, Harvie’s stomach barely makes a loop. Instead her chest, which has been cold and dead since the last wagon of David’s camp vanished on the horizon, aches with unexpected warmth.

Dean relaxes when he sees what she’s looking at, his face twisting into an expression that can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be annoyed or amused.

“He likes to think he’s funny,” he says dryly.

But Harvie notices he doesn’t push the ferret down, and when they eat their breakfast, Sammy perches there with his tail curled around the back of Dean’s neck, eating the pieces of dried meat that Dean feeds him.

* * * * * *

That evening, Harvie comes back from fetching water to find two horses grazing alongside each other. Impala seems grudgingly accepting of her companion, although the chestnut stallion keeps getting flicks of her tail if he gets too close. Harvie isn’t surprised, when the stallion comes over to nudge her chest, to see that its large, intelligent eyes are golden.

Over by the fire, Dean sighs.

“Show off,” Harvie mutters in the stallion’s ear, and then, when Sammy whickers, surreptitiously pets his silky neck.

* * * * * *

Sammy is a cat that night, curled up in Dean’s lap purring loudly enough to be heard on the other side of the fire. Harvie missed the moment of transition—one moment the stallion was a bulky shape in the dark, the next the cat was meowing as it strolled into the firelight—but the evidence of the trick is amazing enough. Now that she isn’t worried she’s going to turn into Sammy’s next meal, that is.

“So,” she says conversationally as Dean feeds another log into the fire, moving carefully to avoid upsetting the cat lazily kneading his thigh. “You were going to tell me what you are.”

“I’m a grumpy old man saddled with an annoying teenager,” Dean answers smoothly.

“I think I have a right to know.”

That gets her a wry look. “Based on what, exactly.”

Wisely, Harvie switches tactics. “He really is Sammy, isn’t he? I mean, your brother. The one you told me about back in...” She trails off abruptly, remembering the circumstances under which they parted company with David’s camp.

The children who came so shyly to their fireside for Dean’s living figurines must surely all be dead now.

Dean frowns, and the night air seems to grow even colder around them. Harvie regrets her questions, regrets stirring unpleasant memories and thoughts to life.

“Did your grandmother ever tell you about the war?” Dean asks, stroking his hand absently over Sammy’s back and redoubling the cat’s purrs.

“The Harrowing?” Harvie checks. “When the sky went black and the riders came?”

Dean nods and then asks, “Did she ever tell you how it ended?”

“No. She just kept saying she’d tell me when I was older, and then... Then she died.”

Harvie’s mama probably knew the story, but she hadn’t wanted to talk about it after granma passed. Just like she hadn’t ever wanted to talk about Harvie’s pa after the rider took him.

“It was all a big pissing contest,” Dean says. “About who God loved more—his rebellious, brilliant son Lucifer, or obedient, stupid Mich—ow!” He swears violently, jerking and shoving Sammy off his lap. The cat gives him a baleful glare, which Dean ignores while rubbing at his thigh. “I can’t believe you fucking scratched me!”

Sammy’s tail flicks in irritation, and he moves toward Dean’s lap again, which drives Dean to his feet in a rush of motion.

“Unh-uh. You think I’m gonna let you maul me again, you got another think coming, dude. Go find another scratching post.”

Sammy stands where he is, tail lashing more sharply, and meows.

“The one with the working set of vocal chords gets to tell the story,” Dean snaps. “You don’t like how I’m doing it, you know how to stop me.”

For a long, drawn out moment they stare at each other. Then the cat turns and stalks away, out of the ring of firelight into the dark. Dean stares after him for a beat longer before sitting with a sigh.

“What was that about?” Harvie asks hesitantly.

“He thinks I have a skewed perception of the facts.”

“Do you?”

When Dean shrugs, there’s a cynical twist to his mouth. “Probably.”

Harvie hates the thought of Sammy off in the night by himself; hates the thought of such a painful strain between the two beings she’s rapidly beginning to think of as her new camp.

“Should you go after him?” she asks.

“Nah,” Dean says, picking up a stick and using it to poke at their fire. “He’ll come back when he cools off. And I could almost pity the supernatural son of a bitch that tries to eat him when he’s in this sort of mood.”

Harvie waits for him to begin again, but Dean’s expression is closed, his gaze turned inward. It doesn’t seem right to drag him out again.

“Guess I’ll turn in,” she offers.

Dean grunts wordlessly and continues staring sightlessly at the flames.

That night, when Harvie sleeps, she dreams of bright figures battling against a fire-shot sky, with wings of pitchy darkness trailing behind them.

* * * * * *

“Does he ever turn back into a person?”

It’s late morning and they’re walking for a change, giving Impala a chance to rest herself as she walks alongside them. Up ahead, Sammy is scuttling along in the shape of a small green lizard, amusing himself by snapping at passing insects and leaving them in fear for their tiny lives.

Dean, who was smiling slightly at Sammy’s antics, sobers.

“Not a whole lot.”

“Why?”

Dean works his jaw for several strides as though considering his words, and then says, “He’s punishing me.”

“For what?”

“Handing out toys,” Dean answers.

Harvie waits a beat to see whether or not Dean is joking, but he doesn’t seem to be. She’s silent, trying to piece together what she knows and suspects and can’t begin to believe.

Up ahead, Sammy tires of his lizard legs and takes to the sky again, soaring up on a hawk’s broad wings.

Dean squints up into the sun, tracking his path with a somber expression.

It’s a long time before he speaks again.

* * * * * *

Disaster strikes when they’re just passing into the foothills of a mountain range.

One moment, the grasslands are quiet and calm, the next they’re seething with low, thick shapes leaping and lashing and making horrible, chittering noises. Sammy shifts immediately, blurring from his hound form into an immense, tawny cat with a shaggy mane and throwing himself at one of their attackers. Dean fires at another, and Harvie is startled to find the pistol Dean gave her in her own hand, safety off as she pulls the trigger repeatedly.

Something soars through the air next to her face—close enough she can feel the wind from its passage—and Impala lets out a high whinny, rearing back and throwing Harvie and Dean both from her back. Harvie lands heavily and rolls, hearing something else whiz past, and then stays down while leaning on one elbow and firing again at the beast that keeps hurling spines from its tail at her. Her first shot is wide, but her second hits its mark well enough and the beast collapses with a spray of blood.

Harvie lies where she is for a moment more, breathing hard and trying to catch her mind up to the present, and gradually becomes aware of the fact that, except for Impala’s labored breathing, it’s eerily, horribly quiet.

“Dean?” she calls, pushing cautiously to her knees and looking around.

She spots him on the other side of Impala’s bulk, another of the beasts lying still and bloodied nearby. One of those spines is sticking up from the side of the horse’s neck. Of Sammy and the remaining beasts, there’s no sight.

Dean isn’t moving.

“Dean!” Harvie calls again, scrambling up and sprinting around Impala—the horse sounds horrible, the noise is twisting Harvie up inside, but she can’t focus on anything but how still Dean is.

She rolls him over and winces at the sight of a long, slender spine embedded in his stomach. His face is flushed with fever. His skin covered in sweat. It’s been moments at most, though, which means this sickness is unnatural—poison, likely.

“Sammy!” she yells, jerking her head up and staring around at the rustling, high grass. “Dean’s hurt!”

The grasslands sends her voice back to her on the wind, and Impala’s labored breaths seem to whisper, _Alone, alone, alone._

* * * * * *

Impala dies just before sunset.

It’s a mercy, Harvie thinks, and the only reason she didn’t shoot the horse earlier is that she wanted to be able to see how the poison’s course runs. Just in case it will make a difference for Dean.

He still hasn’t woken, not truly. He keeps mumbling things—sometimes in the language she knows, sometimes in other tongues. Once, he seemed determined that she was someone named Ellen, and he kept on promising to take care of Jo. Another time, a worse time, he called her mom and apologized with tears in his voice.

“I fucked up,” he kept saying. “I fucked up, I let him down. I’m so sorry.”

He’s quiet now, at least, although Harvie doesn’t care for the clammy feel to his skin, or the blue tint to the whites of his eyes when she rolls his lids back. Impala’s eyes looked like that, before the end.

Dusk creeps through the grassland, and still Sam hasn’t returned.

Harvie rubs at her sore, reddened eyes, and begins to build a fire for the night.

* * * * * *

In the morning, Dean is miraculously still breathing. He even seems to have a little more color in his face, and the blue has faded from the whites of his eyes. Harvie thinks that he’s maybe going to live.

The day grows even brighter when Sammy wearily emerges from the bushes, still wearing the form of that immense cat. Harvie throws her arms around his neck, her knees weak with relief and her chest painfully light.

“Oh, thank God you’re back! I was so worried. And Dean’s sick.”

That’s all she gets out before Sammy charges forward, dislodging her in his haste to reach Dean. He’s the hound again by the time he gets there, crouched low and sniffing at Dean’s body. He whines when he reaches the place where Harvie pulled the spine free, then circles Dean twice and lies down with his head on Dean’s chest. His eyes stare unblinkingly at Dean’s still face.

With Sammy there to watch over her charge, Harvie finally staggers over to Impala’s body, pulls free a blanket, and lies down. She’s asleep almost before her head hits the ground.

* * * * * *

It takes two days for Dean to wake.

Harvie has unloaded Impala by then, and with Sammy’s help ( _in the shape of an immense, hairy thing that’s almost a man but has longer arms and thick, almost leathery skin on its massive hands and feet_ ) dragged the carcass away. She felt bad leaving the horse for the carrion birds, but there seemed nothing else to do; she wasn’t strong enough to bury Impala herself and Sammy wasn’t exactly in any condition to help.

Seeing Dean’s green eyes, even fogged with pain and confusion, is the best gift she’s ever been given.

“Welcome back,” she says, holding him up so that she can pour some water down his throat.

Dean coughs and sputters a little, then smiles weakly while Sammy wags his tail and licks at Dean’s hand.

“Yeah, yeah,” Dean rasps. “I know. Next time, duck.”

Sammy’s answering bark almost sounds like a laugh.

* * * * * *

“Damn. I liked that horse.”

“If it makes you feel better, she didn’t suffer.”

Dean raises one eyebrow as he glances back at Harvie. “You’re a terrible liar,” he accuses.

Harvie, who isn’t sure what to say to that and is positive that they shouldn’t be setting out yet, when Dean clearly needs more time to recover, awkwardly hoists the pack higher on her back and says nothing.

Dean sighs and turns forward again. “Come on, we want to be through the mountains before it snows.”

* * * * * *

If Harvie never sees any mountains again, it’ll be too soon.

The peaks are cold and filled with snow flurries, and there are terrible sounds in the night, like lost souls roaming in search of warm bodies. Dean insists they all stay within the firelight and Sammy continuously wears the form of an immense, formidable bear.

Worse than anything else, though, is the change that seems to grow in Dean as they near the summit. He becomes quiet and withdrawn. He responds slowly to Harvie’s comments, or not at all, and seems to carry an immense, heavy weight inside of himself.

When she asks him what’s wrong one night, he gets an odd half-smile on his face and says, “Just that time of year, I guess. It’s almost my birthday.”

Sammy makes an odd, thick noise at the back of his throat and turns his back on Dean, moving away to stand at the edge of the firelight. Dean stares at the bear’s back for a long while, as the smile slips from his face and the corners of his eyes crinkle with sorrow. He looks old suddenly, and tired and maybe even a little afraid.

Before Harvie can think of something to say to lighten the mood, Dean gives his head a shake and stands, striding over to take out his bag of gears and his toolkit. Sammy’s ears swivel back at the sound and he growls, a low rumble that Harvie feels in her chest.

With his jaw clenched tightly, Dean opens the bag and begins to work.

* * * * * *

In the foothills on the other side of the mountain pass, Harvie wakes one day to find snow dusting the world. Dean is up and standing some distance away, staring down a tiny trail cut into the mountainside. Harvie reluctantly pushes her way free from the warmth of her blankets and stumbles over to join him.

“What’s that?” she yawns, squinting down the path.

A muscle high in Dean’s jaw jumps and, without looking at her, he says, “I have to go away for a few days. Sammy’ll keep an eye on you. Just keep the fire lit after dark and don’t leave the light and you’ll be fine.”

Harvie opens her mouth to argue, but Dean is already moving, walking down the trail without a scrap of supply or protection. Something warm bumps her shoulder and Harvie looks over to find Sammy standing there, gazing after Dean’s retreating back. She’s never heard of a bear that could cry, but there are tears in Sammy’s golden eyes now.

The massive bear stands at the trailhead all day, steady as a stone, and silent, waiting for his brother’s return.

* * * * * *

The moon is high for a change that night, and Harvie wakes to the sound of another branch dropping on the fire. She sits up from her mound of blankets and doesn’t need the firelight to see the man crouched by the flames, bare from shoulders to waist and showing no sign of the cold. He’s wearing a loose pair of pants that he obviously took from the open bag at his side, and his shaggy hair hangs in his face, obscuring his features.

But the bear is gone, and somehow Harvie knows before she says, “Sammy?”

The man looks over at her, golden eyes unreadable in the strange mix of moon and firelight, and offers her a tight, stressed smile.

“It’s Sam,” he says—the rough, hoarse voice from her long-ago not-dream. He gestures to the flames before him. “The fire was going out. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

He did, though. Harvie knows he did. She thinks she knows why, too.

“That’s okay,” she says, getting up and moving closer. With a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and the fire burning, the cold doesn’t seem too bad. “I’m worried about him too.”

Sammy—Sam—blinks, looking surprised, and then grins ruefully. “That transparent, am I?”

She takes a cue from Dean’s book and doesn’t answer the question. Instead, she asks, “Why did he leave?”

Sam’s brow creases and he looks down at his hands. “He’s gone to die,” he says, after a moment. “Once a year, he—” His voice catches and breaks.

Harvie, whose heart was beating faster at the first answer, asks, “But he’ll come back, right?”

“He always has,” Sam answers, his already hoarse voice further choked by emotion. He turns his head from the flames, looks off in the direction Dean disappeared earlier today.

“What happened?”

It’s a question Harvie has tried asking before, one Dean almost answered, but apparently never in the right way. Or maybe it’s just that it has never been just her and Sam and the moon, sitting by the crackle of a fire in the lower reaches of a mountain pass.

“Dean was right about the war being a pissing contest,” Sam says sourly. “And yeah, between Michael and Lucifer. But what he wasn’t going to tell you is that it was my fault Lucifer even got to play. I let him out of his cage, and then I... I said yes. I brought on the apocalypse—what you call the Harrowing.”

Sam’s mouth twitches sadly.

“Dean stopped it. Somehow, he and this angel friend of his went up against Michael together and won. And Dean—he absorbed part of Michael’s grace. And then he came looking for me, and he cast Lucifer out of me and locked him up back in the pit. Only problem was, he couldn’t get everything. Lucifer left a little bit of himself behind, same as there’s a part of Michael inside Dean.”

He gestures to his eyes.

“So Dean… that’s how he knew about my camp. And that I wasn’t a rider,” Harvie guesses. “And why you can turn into different things and do that trick with the figurines.”

But Sam barks a bitter laugh while shaking his head. “No, the figurines are all Dean. His tags, he calls them. I can’t—I can’t create life. I can only end it.” His hands curl into fists, scraping at the bare rock by the edge of the fire. “He just... He likes to pretend he’s still just a man, so I... I play along. It makes him happier.”

“I think maybe being with you makes him happier,” Harvie suggests. “But that could just be me.”

Sam doesn’t seem cheered by the thought, flexing his hands against the ground for a moment before clearing his throat to say, “Anyway, he... part of whatever he did, it involved some sort of deal. With Cas, with Michael, with Lucifer—hell, with God, for all I know. Because he just can’t leave anything I break alone. He has to fix the entire fucking world.”

He’s angry now, bare shoulders and chest steaming. Snow is melting in a wide, perfectly circular ring around him.

“Those figurines he makes? The tags?” Sam says hotly, pinning her with a gaze that seems to contain all the fires of the sun. “He... It’s him for them. I don’t know how he does it, but somehow his deal lets him trade fates with any person who accepts a tag from him. Any deaths allotted to them, he takes on himself. One day every year, and he gets to die a thousand deaths, maybe more. Asshole jokes around and says it’s his birthday, because every time he dies, he’s dragged right back into the world to get ripped apart again.”

Sam is crying now, and Harvie wants to hug him the way she would have hugged Sammy the hound, but he’s a man now and she doesn’t quite dare. All she can do is hold herself still and listen as he pounds his fist against the ground, face tightening in a grimace of pain.

“He kills himself again and again every year, and he won’t even let me be there for him. That selfless, stupid son of a bitch.”

In the quiet that falls between them then, Harvie searches for something meaningful to say and finally comes up with, “Maybe you should be there for him the rest of the year, then.”

Sam jerks as though he’s been slapped, but doesn’t say anything.

Feeling a bit like she just kicked a hungry wolf in the side, Harvie gets up and moves back over to her blankets. She lies down with her back to Sam and pretends to sleep, but it’s a long, long while before she can even close her eyes. Her thoughts are too full of Dean, and a delicate, musical butterfly of brass and steel.

Of the remains of her camp, and what the folks there—what her mama—must have gone through as they died.

She’s too afraid the thoughts will follow her into her dreams.

* * * * * *

Sam is back in his bear shape in the morning, which is disappointing, but not a surprise. He spends the day pretending she isn’t there while nevertheless trailing dutifully after her on her forages for food, then takes up his position at the top of the trail again.

Harvie wonders if they do this here every year, and then decides not. It would be complicated to arrange their arrival at precisely the right moment. Likely, Dean just slips off wherever they are.

He wanders away, to suffer God only knows what sorts of horrible deaths, and then he comes back to his brother. It’s almost enough to make Harvie weep, but she’s cried enough already this year.

Her eyes are dry as she builds up the fire.

* * * * * *

Dean comes back on the dawn of the second day, moving stiffly but otherwise looking just the same as always. Sam greets him at the head of the path, pushing his head against Dean’s chest and resting it there. Dean puts one hand on the back of Sam’s neck, smiling wearily, and stands still, waiting, until Sam finally shuffles back again.

He’s more surprised by Harvie’s hug, and stands there dumbly for a moment before putting an arm around her back.

“What’s this for?” he asks.

“Sam’s right,” she tells him with a choked laugh. “You are stupid.” Then, while he stands there with a perplexed expression, she leans up on her tiptoes and kisses his cheek. “Thank you.”

Twenty two figurines given out in one night. Without hesitation. Because he somehow knew—he _knew_ those children would need protection.

He’s still standing there looking confused when she goes back to the fire to cook breakfast.

* * * * * *

Night again, lower down into the foothills where there’s no snow on the ground.

Harvie wakes to moonlight a second time, and rolls over to look at the rest of the camp. She expects to see the leaner lump of Dean near Sam’s bulk, but instead she finds a single upright shadow on the other side of the fire. It’s a single shadow because the two men are pressed up against one another, no room for air between them.

Sam is taller than Dean, she sees now, and he has his head tilted down, the side of his face pressed against his brother’s. Dean’s expression is startled, but as Harvie watches, she sees awareness dawn in his eyes, swiftly followed by crushing relief. Dean’s arms come up to grip Sam back, one hand cupping the back of Sam’s head and the other splayed over Sam’s bare shoulder blade.

“I’m sorry,” Sam whispers in his hoarse voice. “I’m—I’m so sorry I haven’t been there. For you.”

Harvie’s breath catches. It’s audible, and she’s sure they’re going to look over at her—break the moment—but instead Dean shuts his eyes and tilts his head slightly, resting his temple against the side of his brother’s face. He doesn’t look like he’s going to be ready to let go anytime soon, but then again, Sam doesn’t seem all that inclined to move either.

Harvie’s cheeks grow warm and her chest squirms—private, this is private and none of her business—and she rolls over again.

In the silence that draws out, no movement or murmur to say she isn’t alone, she sleeps again.

* * * * * *

In the morning, Sam is still wearing his human body. He smiles uncomfortably when she looks at him. Dean doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself either, hovering by his brother’s shoulder like a mother pup with a cub.

There’s a long, awkward moment where no one knows what to say. Then Harvie clears her throat.

“So,” she says as heartily as she can. “Anyone else ready to get out of these mountains?”

* * * * * *

Traveling with Sam-as-Sam is different from traveling with Sam-as-hound or Sam-as-ferret or Sam-as-horse. It’s noisier, for one—he seems determined to make up for however many years of silence by using his voice as often as possible. And Dean wasn’t exactly a sour man before, but he grins all the time now, and keeps humming to himself, and bursts out into song as they’re making their slow, wet way through the outskirts of a swamp.

Harvie doesn’t know what a jungle is, or why they’d be welcome to it, but Dean seems to be enjoying himself, so she laughs and attempts to sing along. Dean, heartened by her show of interest, tries to teach her something called “Traveling Riverside Blues”, which Sam endures for several miles before announcing that, if Dean is trying to murder everything within a ten mile radius, he should at least have the decency to use a gun instead of his voice.

Dean retaliates by pushing Sam into the first river they come to.

Harvie’s pretty sure she hasn’t laughed so hard in her life.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the poem [A Rendezvous With Death by Alan Seeger.](http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/i_have_a_rendez-vous_with_death.html)


End file.
